Neil Young streams and streams some more, music pirates buy, the festival circuit explodes, and Concert Window expands

The major festival season, and its burgeoning live streaming component, wrapped up with last weekend’s Austin City Limits Music Festival. But just because there aren’t 130 acts doesn’t mean festival season is over. Neil Young’s famed Bridge School Benefit Concert will stream for its second year in a row this Saturday with a lineup that includes Jack White, Guns N’ Roses, The Flaming Lips, Foster the People, and Lucinda Williams.

This LA Times review of a previous Bridge School concert provided insight as to this is such a beloved event. “This is my favorite gig in the world,” said Sheryl Crow. “After 20 years of touring.”

The debate over digital music file sharing rages on, with TorrentFreak embracing an upcoming study that shows file sharers in the U.S. also buy 30 percent more music than non-file sharers and have music libraries that are 37 percent larger.

Evolver.fm reports on Concert Window, the live streaming concert network launched by two Harvard grads that provides high quality webcasting services to venues throughout the country and has become on of the few such ventures thus far to do so successfully.

HypeBot weighs in on the booming hand-in-hand worlds of music festivals and live streaming and notes that monetization is becoming more of a reality as advertisers take note. “We’ve seen the average view time is over an hour in one sitting…That’s a pretty engaged eyeball for an advertiser to put their dollar against,” says Chris Roach of AEG Digital Media, the company that livestreamed Coachella.

The AEG Live Network, meanwhile, has announced it will stream more concerts after the success of the Global Citizen Festival stream in New York last month — also headlined by Neil Young — became the largest syndication of a live music charity webcast and broadcast in history.